Moral Tale
THE LATE Dr. William H. Welch, one of the stars of the Johns Hopkins Medical School, was a sort of walking reductio ad absurdum of some of the most confident theories of his fellow resurrection-men. For diet he cared precisely nothing, yet he lived to be 84. In exercise he took so little interest that he never had a golf-stick or even a billiard-cue in his hands, yet he was hale and hearty until his last brief illness. And to top it all, he came into the world with the very sort of physique which, if the insurance statisticians are to be believed, means certain death before 50.
Dr. Welch was hardly more than five feet six inches in height, but he must have weighed close to 200 pounds. With his broad brow, fine eyes and closely-clipped beard, be was a very distinguished-looking man, yet it would have been difficult to prove legally that he had a neck. His massive bead, in fact, sat directly on his sturdy chest, and a foot below it there were the beginnings of a majestic paunch. This is the build, according to the professors of such matters, that offers ideal soil for a long list of incurable malaises. It spells high blood-pressure, kidney deterioration and heart disease. When it is combined with a distaste for exercise, a habit of sitting up until all hours of the night and an enlightened appreciation of each and every variety of sound food and drink, it is tantamount, so we are told, to being sentenced to die in the electric-chair at 45. Yet Dr. Welch lived 14 years and 22 days beyond the canonical three-score and ten and had a grand time to the end. And when he died at last it was not of any of the diseases his colleagues had been warning him against for 60 years.
A year or so before his death I happened to sit beside him one day at lunch. The main dish was country ham and greens, and of it he ate a large portion, washing it down with several mugs of beer. There followed lemon meringue pie. He ate an arc of at least 75 degrees of it, and eased it into his system with a cup of coffee. Then he lighted a six-inch panatela and smoked it to the butt. And then he ambled off to attend a medical meeting and to prepare for dinner. The night before, so I gathered from his talk, he had been to a banquet, and sat until 11.30 listening to bad speeches and breathing tobacco smoke. The wines had been good enough for him to remember them and mention them. Returning to his bachelor quarters, he had read until 1 o'clock and then turned in. The morning before our meeting he had devoted to meditation in an easy-chair, cigar in band. At the lunch itself, I forgot to say, he made a speech, beginning in English and finishing in German.
What are we to gather, brethren, from Dr. Welch's chart? Simply that pathology is still far from an exact science, especially in the department of forecasting. In the presence of what are assumed to be causes the expected effects do not always or necessarily follow. Here was a man who stood in the very front rank of the medical profession, and yet his whole life was a refutation of some of its most confident generalizations. He lived to be pallbearer to scores of colleagues who made 36 holes of golf a week a religious rite, and to scores more who went on strict diets at 30 and stuck to them heroically until they died at 50 or 60.
H.L. Mencken
From the Baltimore Sun, April 11, 1935.
Welch was born in 1850 and died in 1934
